Applications selection discussion....

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 11:08 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> As the following touches many topics, please reply suitably modifying
> the subject line.
> 
> I'd like to start a discussion about what applications set to include on
> a spin targeted at G1G1 purchasers looking for a "conventional" laptop.
> Daniel Drake's initial experiments make it seem like with care a Gnome
> desktop is usable, which is a much more polished environment than xfce
> (which while smaller, is much more of a hacker's system), if one is
> careful on app selection.  Having said that, if someone wants to do an
> xfce spin too, that is not a bad thing to have in one's hip pocket. 

So, the thing is, rather than trying to think about a bazillion
different spins that each largely replicate decisions that already have
to be made in other situations, I think there's instead a lot of value
in just ensuring that a user with a G1G1 can just download *any* spin of
Fedora, put it on a USB stick/SD card and use it.

Then the discussion could still be relevant for a preloaded "dual-boot"
XO, but exactly how much so could be debatable.

> Toolkit stack
> -------------
> ATK, but only as an option (it pulls in some of the more objectionable
> bonobo dependencies at the moment).

ATK itself is, I suspect, pretty much impossible to avoid.  The higher
level bits that are actually the accessibility implementations I can see
not including

> Avoid Mono libraries in basic load
> (footprint)

We leave mono off of most of the live images already due to space
constraints

> Definite outs
> -------------
> Open Office
> (too big basic footprint; users can load if they want/need it)

Yep, again, matches what we do with the default live image

> Fonts
> We'll need to sort through a lot of these and nuke a lot 
> of bitmap and other fonts (e.g. type1, etc).

The default font set that's being installed now should be pretty
reasonable.  If not, letting someone from the fonts SIG know would be a
lot better than just pulling haphazardly.

>     Games
> 	What games?  Can we afford the gnome assortment, or 
> 	must we repackage for size reasons?  Download size is only a bit
> 	over 1 meg compressed bz2, so I'm tempted to include them all.

Yeah, the basic gnome-games isn't big at this point and is a reasonable
set.

>     Graphics
> 	Some camera app for the camera (see below)

cheese should be being installed by default now and works okay

> o graphics - (gimp, inkscape, others)

inkscape ends up being expensive as its one of very few things which requires gtkmm. 

> 1) mail client....  The logical candidates would include Thunderbird,
> Claws, Sylpheed, Balsa.  Are there others? Sylpheed has poor docs.  I'd
> be quite interested in Thunderbird, but right now, Thunderbird 2 is
> based on the old gecko engine, and won't make it in time, so would come
> at a higher cost of both flash and RAM footprint.
> 
> Possibilities I know of boil down to Claws and Balsa.  Opinions?

Claws is just an obsolete version of Sylpheed that's basically not
maintained anymore iirc.  Balsa is ...  not good.

Maybe someone looking at building tinymail and modest would be
interesting.  As if it can fit on the n8x0, then surely it should be
fine for the XO.

> 2) RSS reader....  Claws has a plug in; Firefox can do it, but dunno how
> well; others?

How many people really use standalone rss readers?  I'm not really sure
this is something that matters as part of a "default" application set.

> 3) Printing...  Several options:
>    a) none at all unless you yum install it
>    b) default config cups client library only (no cups server);

If you don't have cups-libs, you don't have GTK+.  So a) really isn't an
option.  This might work, but owuld need someone testing

> 4) What themes?

While it's silly, having a few things to choose from by default here
really makes people feel "better" about it being a complete desktop.  If
your target is someone using their G1G1 as a "normal-ish" laptop, then
having a few themes by default is worth the small cost

> 5) What camera application?  Need something to demo the camera in the
> XO.  This will likely need testing, as gstreamer/VFL2 seems immature in
> OLPC's experience....

cheese should be the answer here.  And if it's not good enough, file
bugs/fix it.  

> 6) what IM client?  And don't suggest xchat ;-)  Pidgin?

With Fedora 10, there may be a transition to empathy from pidgin -- it's
at least being tested out for the beta.  Following that is likely the
best plan

> 7) music player Rhythmbox? or something else? There are many to choose
> from.

As someone else said later in the thread, if you just want to play a few
songs (seems somewhat likely given the lack of storage :), totem may
well be plenty here.

Jeremy